Rage's latest covers tunes by other artists

What makes "Renegades" the best Rage Against the Machine album ever? It's simple: Zack de la Rocha didn't write the lyrics.

The rabble-rousing Los Angeles foursome recorded its fourth album  a collection of songs originally done by Afrika Bambaataa, the MC5, Iggy Pop and others  before de la Rocha announced last month that he was moving on to incite revolution as a solo artist.

"Renegades"  whose cover is a knock-off of the LOVE statue in JFK Plaza  brandishes Rage's considerable strengths while minimizing its weaknesses. Uncanny guitarist Tom Morello turns his instrument into a scratching turntable, a buzz saw, a neutron bomb.

Bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk pound incisively.

As for de la Rocha, for the most part, he's his usual, screechy, super-intense, totally-committed-to-the-cause self. (The exception is Devo's "Beautiful World," in which he resists the urge to go ballistic.)

But instead of shrieking the abstract, less-than-coherent hip-hop battle cries that have filled up previous Rage albums, here he draws out the militancy in the words of more articulate scribes, such as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Ian MacKaye.

In so doing, de la Rocha and Rage find the fury that links Cypress Hill's "How I Can Just Kill a Man" and the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man."